Dr William Gallois

 

Job Title: Reader Qualifications: PhD Telephone: +44 (0)20 8392 5793 Email Address: W.Gallois@roehampton.ac.uk

Introduction

My main areas of teaching and research interest are in European history, Arab-Islamic history, and the connection between these two fields. Before coming to Roehampton I studied at the universities of Oxford and Bristol, and worked at Queen Mary, University of London, the American University of Sharjah and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Availability

In autumn 2008 I have office hours on Mondays (1.0-3.0) and Thursdays (1.0-3.0).

Roles and responsibilities

I am the convener for the undergraduate History programme.

Current research

I recently finished a book entitled 'Time, Religion and History', which I hope constitutes a major addition to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history. The book argues that historians have tended to ignore the central prop of their discipline (time), and that examination of religious cultures reveals the atypical qualities of the western, empirical model of time upon which the discipline depends. The book was published by Longman in October 2007 and has been described by Markus Daeschel as 'breathtakingly ambitious and crystal clear in its argumentation' and by Pene Corfield of Royal Holloway as 'Thought-provoking, ambitious, immensely learned'.

I have also recently completed a monograph entitled 'The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Colonial Algeria', which Palgrave will publish in November 2008. This book contends that the history of medicine affords us a great opportunity to understand the ethics of the modern colonial encounter. Using previously-unstudied documents from the French colonial archives, I argue that French medicine, which was founded on rather narrow Hippocratic ethics, encountered a much more complex medical ethical culture in Algeria. This meeting, and the misunderstanings it generated, became emblematic of the French colonial experience in Algeria.

I am also publishing in a number of areas of intellectual history which look at the movement of ideas from the Arab-Islamic world to western Europe, especially the ideal and practice of cosmopolitanism.

Future research

My next two books will look at, respectively, the history of goodness and badness. The first will look at the ways in which the rulers of the Iberian kingdom of Navarre protected their Jewish and Muslim subjects in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while my work on badness will look at massacres in nineteenth-century Algeria. The projects are intentionally twinned and form a part of my overarching aim of developing the field of moral history.

I also have plans to continue my work in the history of capitalism, most particularly in the study of the Gulf.

Publications

(2008) The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Colonial Algeria, .

(2007) Local Responses to French Medical Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Social History of Medicine, 28.2.

(2007) Time, Religion and History, London: Longman-Pearson.

(2006) L'Histoire du capitalisme a Doubai, Maghreb-Mashrek.

(2006) L'histoire secrete du cosmopolitanisme, Annuaire francais des relations internationales.

(2006) Todorov's Gift of Ethics to History, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

(2005) Andalusi Cosmopolitanism in World History, in Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (ed), Cultural Contacts in Building Islamic Civilisation, Istanbul: IRCICA.

(2005) Emile Zola's Forgotten History, French History, 19-1, 67-90.

(2004) Against Capitalism? French Theory and the Economy after 1945, in Julian Bourg (ed), After the Deluge: New Perspectives on Postwar French Intellectual and Cultural History, New York: Lexington Books.

(2003) Towards a Typology of Moral Histories: Narrating Al-Andalus, Journal of Social Affairs, 61-85.

(2000) Industrial Culture and Alienation in Zola's La Bete humaine, in Larry Duffy and Catherine Emerson (eds), La Nature devoile: French Literary Responses to Science, Hull: Hull University Press, 95-104.

(1999) Zola: The History of Capitalism, Bern: Peter Lang.

(1998) Ending Resistance or Resisting Ending? Politics across the Fin de Siecle, in Anne Fremiot (ed), Fin de Siecle, Nottingham: Nottingham University, 39-52.

(1998) The Forgotten Legacy of Emile Zola, Bulletin of the Emile Zola Society, 15, 7-12.

Undergraduate courses taught at Roehampton:

History

Postgraduate courses taught at Roehampton:

Historical Research
History